Blog prompt for 1/08/19

The NGSS Lesson Screening tool is posted on Gaucho Space. (link is https://www.nextgenscience.org/NGSSLessonScreener).  This is a tool used to assess how well lessons are aligned with the NGSS. It includes 6 criteria: 

A: Explaining phenomena or designing solutions 

B: Three dimensions 

C: Integrating the three dimensions for instruction and assessment

D: Relevance and authenticity

E: Student ideas

F: Building on students' prior knowledge 

A "lesson" in our case will include the entire suite of activities  for one of our Engineering Exploration (EE) lab activities, including the 2 pre- and 1 post- classroom extensions (CEs). We will be  looking at EE1: the wind column activity suite which includes: 

CE1: Parachute activity we did in MAPS this week (goal is for students to complete an investigation and to think about forces. Students should leave with age-appropriate understandings of "fair tests" and of two forces acting on the parachute: (1) gravitational force of the earth pulling down and (2) air pushing up. 

CE2: Pennyships activity. This is an engineering design activity. Primary goal is to introduce students (and teachers) to engineering process and to the idea of iterative design. 

EE: Wind column workshop. More engineering. 

CE3: This activity will link the in class and field trip activities and provide opportunities to reflect on engineering process and develop a deeper understanding of forces acting on the pennyship (when falling in the classroom and when hovering in wind column workshop). 

Blog assignment: Read through the lesson screening rubric. Choose 2 criteria. One should be from the "NGSS shifts" category (criteria A-C) and one from the the "Features of Quality Design" category (criteria D-F) and write about the ways you see that the lesson activities provides evidence for these criteria and ways the curriculum can be improved to support the criteria better. Your "evidence" should come from your experience reading the lesson plan and participating in CE1 today and experience facilitating EE1 at MOXI.

The goal of this blog post is for you to gain some familiarity with the screening tool and to think about the EE activities from the perspective of a curriculum developer/evaluator. It is not about getting the "right" answers or making sure you have thoroughly documented all the evidence.